Oakland police force handcuffed

ON THE EAST BAY

Updated 10:37 pm, Thursday, September 13, 2012

Inside the department, there's an administrative scramble to meet a court-imposed December deadline to accomplish 51 reform tasks identified in a 2003 negotiated court settlement stemming from a police abuse case. On the streets of the city, the beleaguered department is losing ground: Department statistics show a 12 percent rise in overall crime from a year ago; serious crimes have risen 17 percent.

Failure to comply with the court agreement before the December hearing could prompt U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson to appoint a federal receiver to take control of city's police force.

LATEST SFGATE VIDEOS

Meeting the requirements of full compliance has been no less chaotic inside Oakland City Hall.

Last month, the city accused the court-appointed monitor overseeing the compliance of behaving improperly toward City Administrator Deanna Santana, and Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who skipped a scheduled Aug. 30, deposition related to the case, drew a warning from the court that she risks punitive action if she misses the next scheduled deposition. Henderson, meanwhile, denied a request by the city to halt all contact between Oakland officials and the court monitor, Robert Warshaw.

What's getting lost in the shuffle is the Police Department's duty to protect the people who live and work in Oakland every day, especially those living in high-crime areas who are directly impacted by the success or failure of law enforcement policies, strategies and methods.

The city's no safer than it was a year ago. The same crime problems that plagued residents last year plague them still, and Oakland's still listed among the nation's most violent cities.

The Police Department is still short hundreds of officers. The gap between the number of officers per resident and the rate of violent crime is wider in Oakland than in any other big city in the state. Oakland's rate, according to 2010 FBI crime statistics, was 9.3 violent crimes per officer and 15.3 violent crimes for every 1,000 residents. It was nearly three times the violent crime rate in Los Angeles. And that was two years ago, when we had more police officers and less crime.

It has been years since the city had a police recruiting class. A new police academy begins on Monday. But in the meantime, attrition continues to thin the ranks of the 638 sworn officers in the department.

Over the years, in the steady succession of Oakland police chiefs and mayors who have come and gone, the department's authority to manage itself has steadily eroded.

It's clear both from the department's legal troubles and the close watch kept on it by Quan's office that Oakland's police brass doesn't have the last word on tactics or deployment strategy or anything else, and it's been that way for about the last 15 years, ever since Jerry Brown tried his hand at running a police department when he was Oakland's mayor.

The tradition of micro-managing begun by Brown remains in place today, but it hasn't worked out for his successors any better than it worked out for him. And for residents, it hasn't resulted in a new, more efficient, updated police department. Even the police communications system doesn't work properly.

If the proof is in the pudding, the disorganized manner in which the city has conducted its reform efforts only strengthens assertions from civil rights attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin and make the findings of the court monitor even more compelling. Both parties favor federal receivership as a last resort.

If these are the results after nine years of trying to accomplish the task, maybe the lawyers are right.

"Sometimes the problem can be that there are too many cooks stirring the soup - and that can be an argument in favor of a federal monitor," said Frank Zimring, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Law. "Chaotic interactions can make it impossible to steer a ship," he added.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.